Negative concord items inside adjective phrases in Russian: An experimental study

The article presents the results of a syntactic experiment aimed at identifying the conditions necessary for licensing of negative pronouns embedded in an adjective phrase (AdjP) by sentential negation (Trener ne byl dovolen nikem iz sportsmenov ‘The trainer was not content with anybody of the sportsmen’). The experimental results demonstrate that such licensing is possible if the adjective is predicative, and impossible if it is attributive. At the same time, for predicative AdjPs, the licensing of negative pronoun complements does not depend on the morphological form of the adjective, being possible for both long-form and short-form adjectives. As for attributive adjectives, licensing is impossible regardless of the grammatical function and case marking of the noun phrase modified by such an adjective. In particular, even adjectives modifying nominals in the genitive of negation cannot take negative pronouns as complements, if the only potential licensor of such a pronoun is the sentential negation. The article also discusses possible approaches to formal modeling of the identified constraints using the apparatus of generative syntax. The most promising approach is based on the concept of a horizon for an Agreement probe proposed by Stefan Keine (2016). Such an analysis allows one to take into account language-specific nature of the identified restrictions on the locality of intra-clausal negative concord, since negative pronouns that are complements of attributive adjectives can be licensed by sentential negation (in a contradistinction to Russian) in Spanish (a language with a non-strict negative concord) and Polish (which, as Russian, features strict negative concord).